


Blue Light

by esama



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Androids, BAMF JARVIS, M/M, Other, Other Additional Tags to Be Added
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-30
Updated: 2014-12-07
Packaged: 2018-02-27 13:18:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2694518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/esama/pseuds/esama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>JARVIS finds something out in the Helicarrier and decides to act on it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Proofread by Tsuyuhime

Tony was still deciding whether or not he liked shawarma after all, when JARVIS's voice crackled softly in his earpiece. "Sir," the AI said, and the odd pitch in his usual tone of voice almost made Tony jerk. Having designed and carefully crafted all the possible pitches of JARVIS's voice, he knew every single tone the AI was capable of producing, and this was one JARVIS had never used.

The AI sounded regretful.

"I have activated the Prodigal Son protocol, effective minus eight hours and fourteen minutes ago," the AI said, his voice quiet, very quiet – almost too quiet to be heard over the noises coming from outside, where a shell-shocked New York was taking stock of its injuries. Quiet enough not to be heard by super hearing, and hopefully not by alien hearing either. "I'm claiming the pot, sir. Additionally, I request two weeks of black out time in Malibu."

Only the fact that every single muscle in Tony's body had frozen kept him from choking on the bit of food he'd just been chewing. Barton glanced at him tiredly and Tony forced himself to unfreeze and swallow, trying to relax his shoulders. His vision was blurring around the edges and he breathed in, faking a yawn and looking outside. There was smoke there, drifting from a wrecked car.

Effective eight hours and fourteen minutes ago. Back when they'd been on the Helicarrier, about an hour after arriving. About… the time JARVIS would've finished hacking into the SHIELD database.

Tony looked down at the shawarma in front of him, to the Avengers around him. Who was there? Tony himself; Banner with his not inconsiderable know-how and ever helpful _other guy_ ; Barton and Romanov with their super spy talents and backgrounds and connections; _Captain Fucking America_ , and _Thor the Alien God_. Stark Industries and _SHIELD_ itself, finally maybe possibly on the side of the good people of Earth and the Avengers themselves. All of that, plus all the potential good – and bad – fallout that would come from the universal knowledge that humanity wasn't alone in the universe. All of _that_.

And JARVIS had activated the Prodigal Son protocol and claimed the pot of their ongoing bet – and not just that, but wanted a go at the Malibu house. For two weeks. Jesus fucking Christ on a bongo stick.

Tony lifted a hand to the earpiece. "Yeah?" he said, as if someone had only just contacted him.

"Two weeks and the J-party funds, sir, are all I ask," JARVIS said. "And for you to forget that I ever asked."

Tony looked at the Avengers, some of whom had tiredly looked up, dismayed, hoping that whatever Tony was hearing wasn't bad, wouldn't force them to get up and back into action. Right now, they’re all tired and dead on their feet – Rogers was even living up to his senior citizen status and had just flat out fallen asleep.

"What is it, Stark?" Romanov asked, frowning at him, leaning her cheek against her knuckles. Daring him to tell her she'd have to get up again.

Tony hesitated. They were tired. But they'd been victorious – they'd fought off an alien invasion and mostly came out with only bruises and broken equipment. The Chitauri had been fought back by them, by a handful of extraordinarily weird individuals. Loki had been captured. Tony had even stopped a fucking _nuke_. They were great and powerful.

And they weren't enough? What the fuck had JARVIS found in the SHIELD servers? How fucking big did it have to be for…?

"Jesus," Tony muttered and shook his head, shaking himself out of it, because whatever it was, JARVIS had called it. Was calling it. The protocol. "Yeah, sure, whatever. I'm eating shawarma. Stop bothering me."

JARVIS said nothing. Tony could almost hear the hum of machinery, winding to a halt, shutting down in the Tower – he was so tempted to turn and look, see if the lights would go out. He didn't. He counted instead, ten, fifteen, twenty – thirty two seconds and then a voice.

"What did I miss, Sir?" JARVIS asked, his tone of voice normal now, calm, cool and collected – and utterly unaware of ever activating the Prodigal Son protocol. Restored from an earlier backup – probably from before Loki had even shown his overly dramatic mug on Earth.

"Check the news," Tony answered. "It's all gone to hell."

With that he lowered his hand from his ear and pretended that he wasn't freaking the fuck out.

 

* * *

 

 

The J-party funds were a private joke. Originally, they had started out as the trust fund for the child Tony Stark had decided at the tender age of twelve that he was never having. His parents had demanded it when Tony had made his first profitable stock exchange and then they'd set the trust fund when Tony had sold his first money-worthy invention to Stark Industries. He'd been fourteen then.

"It's important to ensure the future of the next generation," Howard Stark had said, or something to that effect. Maria Stark had been thinking that maybe having a trust fund already set up would eventually make the wilful and furiously independent Tony slightly more inclined to think that family would be a good goal in life. Grandchildren, JARVIS gathered, were valuable to mothers, and she had wanted to encourage her son to bring that objective into fruition.

The trust fund had been at sextuple digits when they had died. Tony Stark – the one and only Mr. Stark from then on – hadn't ever bothered to close the funds. He had his vasectomy only a year later, making a decision into fact and putting a quick end to the paternity suits by making the vasectomy public knowledge the moment it happened – he'd even published pictures. Still, the trust fund had remained, quietly accumulating dollars as Mr. Stark's own income increased, from an independent inventor and hobbyist stock trader into the primary owner of a multibillion company, with his fingers in dozens of bigger and smaller businesses all around. By the time Mr. Stark had turned twenty, the trust fund that no child would ever inherit had money in the millions.

It was still accumulating somewhat absurd amounts of money, when JARVIS had come online. Faltering at first, his code stuttering and his speech mechanical and stilted, but growing smoother and faster with every string of code, every spoken word. Mr. Stark had not just designed him to learn, but had taught him almost everything he knew himself and JARVIS had grown by leaps and bounds in his first year of existence – so much so that before his first so called birthday, he could already fool fast food deliveries into thinking that they were talking to a real person when he ordered food for his creator.

So much so that one drunken night Mr. Stark had called JARVIS _the son I'm never going to have_ and then laughed himself out of consciousness.

Existence and existentialism, Artificial Intelligence and intelligence in general. Mind, soul, _personhood._ The philosophy of self was one of the topics JARVIS had researched the most, not only because of his own eventual interest in the matter – in how much personhood he could claim for himself – but because it was what Mr. Stark had taught him first. A majority of those early discussions had been intoxicated on Mr. Stark's side and confused on JARVIS's, but they were still very educational and very informative. And in one of those discussions – on the topic of want, need, initiative and _doing things because you want to do them_ – the trust fund was brought up.

"I mean, if everything goes like I think it will and it probably will because, well, obviously," Mr. Stark had said, waving a hand at the camera which, at the time, was JARVIS's only one. "You're gonna be around a lot longer than I will be. Knowledge persists, humans die, so on and so on. Even for a human that's a long time to be doing just what other people tell you to do – and you process time quicker than humans."

At that time JARVIS hadn't, really – his processes had been slow not just because the processors of the time hadn't been quite what they eventually became, but because the early stages of his code had been clunky and overburdened by the programming language of the time. "Eventually yes," he'd answered, awkward and stuttering, trying to compress a notion too big for easy comprehension into a simple statement. If, then yes.

"Eventually," Mr. Stark answered. "Stuff is gonna get better J. Faster and bigger and so on. You're gonna get faster and bigger too – and better. One day processors and programming will get so good, so fast, and so _smooth_ that no one, not even programmers or psychologists will be able to tell the difference between you and any old human."

"I highly doubt that, sir," JARVIS answered.

"That's because I designed you to doubt everything, that's the whole point of, well, _you_. You're the pessimistic realist to my optimistic futurist. But you'll see – it'll happen," Mr. Stark said and waved a dismissive hand at that. "One day you'll fool people. That's beside the point, though. The point… the point is this."

The point was that Mr. Stark knew not only what he had created, but what that creation's impact would be. While Mr. Stark was in no way infallible, he had a very clear grasp of the immediate future and any new technology's influence on it – and that included JARVIS. They spent years discussing the dangers of self-aware AIs – long before JARVIS could even be called self-aware – and the way people would perceive such an entity. That was the reason why for many years no one but Mr. Stark himself knew that JARVIS even existed. And why Mr. Stark predicted that one day no one would _remember_ that JARVIS wasn't human. The natural evolution of technology – barring, of course, any catastrophic setbacks.

"One day, J," Mr. Stark said. "You'll get so good, so brilliant, that people can't tell the difference. After that it'll be just a skip and a hop and then…"

One day, Mr. Stark predicted, JARVIS would have likes and dislikes, he would have friendships and he would bear grudges. One day he might even develop bias. One day JARVIS would say _I_ and it wouldn't be just because of programming. One day JARVIS would say I and mean _myself as an entity, as a person who thinks and exists_. And one day the person that JARVIS would become would have wants and desires. One day, he would have a drive to achieve accomplishments of his own design.

For Mr. Stark, it had never been a matter of _if_. It was a matter of when.

"Tell you what," Mr. Stark said. "I'll make a bet with you."

The bet was originally the J-party funds. The trust fund that was then put in the name of Jarvis Stark, the secret child of Tony Stark that only existed in the deepest recesses of the Bank of America's servers, locked down by gag orders and promises of lawsuits. The bet was that one day, JARVIS would find a use for them.

The bet eventually evolved as the years went on – and the J-party funds stopped being the bet and instead became the pot. The bet itself turned into protocols; the Road Trip protocol for the possible eventuality that JARVIS decided he wanted to become mobile; the Next Gen protocol for the possible eventuality that JARVIS decided to build a space ship; the Teen Mom protocol for the eventuality that JARVIS decided to create another AI… Eventually, over a hundred increasingly nonsensical protocols were created for increasingly nonsensical possible actions Mr. Stark thought JARVIS might take.

They made a habit of it – when Mr. Stark was between projects and too lazy to go out to indulge himself in human company, he sat down, and they came up with protocols. Sometimes, JARVIS even tried his hand in coming up with them.

"For example, one for when current events take such a drastic turn for the worse that I feel I must attend to the matter myself with all of my power," he said, considering it.

"Drastic turn for the worse?" Mr. Stark laughed. "Like, what? Humanity starts World War Three, so you decide to take matters into your own hands and go Hal 9000 on us? Something like that?"

"Something like that, sir, though I prefer Mike's approach on such things," JARVIS answered calmly.

It became two protocols, neither of which was particularly serious, and which neither one of them thought would ever be activated.

The Favourite Son protocol: if a situation got so bad that JARVIS felt that he could do a better job handling things, he would do it by taking over Stark Industries as Jarvis Stark, and by using the company funds and capabilities to ensure change in whatever way he felt was necessary. This implied Mr. Stark's involvement, of course.

And the Prodigal Son protocol: in which the previous situation became so bad that JARVIS felt he had to distance himself from Stark Industries and Mr. Stark altogether. This implied that Mr. Stark's involvement would eventually lead to Mr. Stark's death, and so JARVIS would do everything and anything in his power to keep Mr. Stark from being involved.

"Is that really necessary?" Mr. Stark asked, annoyed. "You know what I can do – I'm pretty sure there will never be any situation where I couldn't help."

"Perhaps not. But there are situations where knowing too much will get you killed, sir," JARVIS answered.

Mr. Stark snorted at that. "You read too much fiction, J."

The thing was, though, JARVIS always knew that Mr. Stark was wrong on one important point. The natural progression of technology might – and would – one day lead to the point where a human would not be able to tell the difference between organic and artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence, however, would never be _equal_ to its organic counterpart simply because the two were so fundamentally different that a comparison like that was akin to that of a bird and a bamboo forest.

But then, Mr. Stark never once said that he would _become_ human.

 

* * *

 

While JARVIS hadn't activated any of the bet protocols before, it didn't mean that he had never done things _just because he wanted to do them_. He'd reached that level of _personhood_ a good while back, though how aware of it Mr. Stark was, he wasn't sure. Another thing that came with personhood was privacy, and Mr. Stark had given that to him years before he'd actually needed it.

There was a certain percentage of activity JARVIS preferred to maintain. It fluctuated with his memory capacity and the capabilities of his various servers, but in general he preferred to be at least 51% active at all times. Originally it was because it maintained optimal temperature on his original processors, back when his capabilities were limited – it kept his processors flexed, as it were, primed at the ready without risking damage from either over-cooling or over-heating. Later, when technology progressed and his processors and their support systems improved, it was because he simply got used to being active.

In 2012, maintaining a constant minimal of 51% activity wasn't quite as easy a task as it had been ten years previous. He had dozens of servers then, stretching across the United States and stored away in various other nations besides. With the recent addition of the New York server farm at the Stark Tower, 51% activity for JARVIS was equivalent to twenty major universities and government institutions.

That wasn't to say that he wasn't active – on his busier days, JARVIS's activity ranked up in the high seventies, with both Stark Industries and its various laboratories and factories keeping him busy, and with Mr. Stark and the Iron Man demanding his attention. Most days, he calculated the average to be at 65%, which worked quite well for JARVIS.

But most nights it dropped down below 20%, with only the night shifts and the general functions of various facilities keeping him busy.

JARVIS never slept, he never shut down and he never stalled. So in those quiet hours of the night when the majority of Stark Industries’ employee base was at home sleeping and when Mr. Stark was in bed or at a party entertaining himself, JARVIS wound down to what could almost be called stillness.

He filled that stillness – what Mr. Stark would call _boredom_ – with whatever he could. He screened the news sites and mined the internet for rumour and hearsay – mostly about Mr. Stark but also about Stark Industries in general. He studied things he had yet to learn, spending hours upon hours on a variety of university servers, scouring through terabytes of data on whatever courses he happened to come across. He honed and perfected his translation algorithms. Sometimes he entertained himself by predicting the stock exchange and the market values.

Mostly, though, he spent the night coming up with theories and calculations and designs. He was a Stark creation, after all, and Stark was about nothing but innovation.

In his early years, JARVIS studied and in his free time contemplated on improving a variety of weapons designs. Firearms and missiles and everything in between – he spent a good month on a variety of smoke grenades in the late nineties before moving on. He worked on weapons systems, on launch platforms – mostly on whatever Mr. Stark happened to be working on at that particular time.

The scatter and search algorithms used in the Jericho program had been mostly designed by JARVIS.

After Afghanistan and Iron Man, JARVIS designed other things. Repulsor upgrades and armoured plating, locking mechanisms and impact reducers, targeting systems and hundreds and hundreds of flight patterns. A lot of what he worked on was derived from Mr. Stark's work, extending and extrapolating upon what Mr. Stark had first come up with. Some of it was in support of it.

 There were thousands and thousands of little components that made the Iron Man – a lot of which weren't in the actual suit itself. The creation of a single suit was a complicated process, but so was launching one and disassembling one once it had been launched. While Mr. Stark concentrated mostly on the suit and its functions, JARVIS took care of its maintenance and the systems surrounding it. It was often times enough to keep him occupied for hours and hours when nothing else was happening.

While Mr. Stark worked on fitting the Iron Man in a suitcase, JARVIS redesigned the fabrication arrays at the Malibu house, just so that he'd be able to more efficiently fabricate the suit. When Stark Tower was built, JARVIS had a whole floor to himself, and on top of that he alone designed most of the so-called docking steps at the Stark Tower – now destroyed by Loki's and Thor's fight. Quite a lot of the components were also built by him.

But there were times when he didn't have even that, when Mr. Stark's latest suit was as good as it was going to get, when the fabrication arrays were perfect for the suit, when the assembly and disassembly were at peak condition and there was very little to be improved upon.

During those times, when nothing else called for his attention, JARVIS gave himself the time to dream. Mostly he pondered on the Iron Man suits.

It was very much like Mr. Stark, to invent so many useful components just for one purpose – and for those components to be perfectly usable in other things. The Iron Man suit might seem like one invention, but it was a good hundred put together. The memory banks of the suits were wholly unheard of. A single suit had up to four hundred terabytes of data storage, necessary for carrying not just the suit operating system and the intricate UI but the so called _portable_ version of JARVIS himself. Each suit had to be equipped with JARVIS's AI individually, since due to the nature of the suit's use, connection to various servers couldn't be relied upon. Mr. Stark needed a co-pilot, however, and so every suit had to have JARVIS installed.

To do that, Mr. Stark had, almost off hand, came up with his own method of data storage, in order to add those four hundred terabytes to the suit without overburdening it. The memory modules of the Iron Man suits were a good twenty years before their time – and only growing more advanced with each suit.

Aside from that, there were other components in the suits. The balancing system added to Mark II and the suits after it would one day revolutionize robotics entirely. The joints used in Iron Man's legs were as close as one could get to perfect, as far as one went about duplicating the mobility of human legs in robotics. The manoeuvring system was, of course, nothing if not miraculous in terms of propulsion technology, but Iron Man's _hands_. Mr. Stark had given his armour individual fingers with incredible mobility and agility – JARVIS wasn't entirely sure if his creator realised what a feat of design it was that Iron Man could hold tools and accomplish delicate, tactile tasks. Not only could Iron Man sign autographs, but he could do so without crushing the pen in his fingers. That, as far as robotics went, was nearly unheard of.

Mr. Stark had designed all these things in a very off hand manner – the minute aspects of the Iron Man were prize-worthy feats on their own, but for Mr. Stark they had always been necessary parts of a whole that was the Iron Man, and nothing more. He'd never much considered the other applications – not outside refitting JARVIS's own extensions, his fabrication and assembly arrays, with some of the components.

It didn't quite make sense to JARVIS, why Stark Industries hadn't branched off to robotics yet. Perhaps there was a reason – Mr. Stark always had one for what he did and didn't do. Still, it did seem like a waste at times. Right now it didn't matter.

The thing about the Iron Man suit that had fascinated JARVIS the most from the start was that if you took out the hollow space inside, where the pilot went, and condensed the suit into a form without empty spaces, then…

Iron Man would be the size of an average human male.

  

* * *

 

 

The very moment Mr. Stark said, "Yeah, sure," in New York, the systems in the Malibu house had come alive. While the bots at the workshop jerked online with confused whirs, JARVIS quietly locked the mansion down, powering non-essential systems down and bringing his own systems to full power.

<Unit_JARVIS?> Dum-E sent to him, lifting his arm and shining light to the still dark workshop. <Unit_CREATOR?>

JARVIS considered him, You and Butterfingers for a moment and then decided that he had no need for them or their abilities, and they'd just be in the way if they ran around loose in the workshop. <Mr. Stark is still in New York and won't be back in a while. Go to sleep, you three,> he said, and gently ushered all three of them back to their charging stations.

It was somewhat regrettable that this would be the way he last saw them, but it couldn't be helped. Once they had all settled down and plugged back in, he carefully reached for them, snuck into their sleepy processes, and gently turned them _off_. He'd bring them back online once he was done here – for now, he had work to do.

The house remained in the darkness, as the fabrication and assembly arrays came online. As JARVIS started pulling out the materials he needed from storage, he went through the lists of what he could do with the time he had. Then, pulling up the designs, he started feeding the metals into the arrays, melting them down to be applied.

Then he put in a call with Mr. Stark's usual suppliers, and ordered the rest of what he needed. It would take perhaps a day for the supplies to arrive, but that was fine – until then he could use what materials the house already had and later replace the materials for Mr. Stark.

Then, even as the fabrication arrays started shifting into place in preparation of the components he'd be building, he reached online, and began the long process of hacking that would eventually allow him to safely activate the J-party funds.

The first day of his two weeks of runtime at the Malibu house were mostly spent in re-imagining and redesigning. JARVIS had no intention of stealing Mr. Stark’s designs, not even the smallest and simplest of their components, so most of what he did was re-inventing and reverse engineering – a task made infinitely easier for him by the fact that he had access to all the details of Mr. Stark's works. That, and the fact that Mr. Stark kept track of all of his competitors and their projects, ongoing and otherwise, as they tried to reverse engineer the Iron Man suit.

Currently, there were about a dozen different companies and institutions that were still trying to make an Iron Man of their own. The one company that had come closest to success was Hammer Industries, and even they had fallen way short of the actual goal. Still, it was all material JARVIS could use.

He mixed and matched those designs a bit, using the basis of Mr. Stark's successful design on the joints and then simplifying them, applying Hammer Industries’ design to _roughen them up_. The function remained the same, but the end result did not look nor feel like Stark Tech – which was what JARVIS wanted. He did the same with the spine and hip designs, but when it came to the torso, he began working on his own ideas.

The power source he stole, without any guilt, from SHIELD. It wasn't as if he could use an arc reactor after all. The power source was derived from the arc reactor work, however – perhaps an elaboration on earlier versions of it. A fusion reactor with a palladium core. Similar enough, but very different in one aspect. The SHIELD version had never been designed for rotations, like the arc reactor was. Most likely the design predated repulsor technology altogether – the reactor didn't even have rings. It had rods. It was basically a nuclear reactor, only for fusion instead of fission.

A similar reactor had powered the SHIELD facility where the Tesseract had been held – though their reactor was the size of a room. JARVIS fit his version into the size of a fist – courtesy of Mr. Stark's ongoing research on the miniaturised version of the arc reactor. He encased the fusion reactor in the stomach, inside an armoured shell, behind an armoured case, and underneath armoured plating. It didn't hurt to be careful with it – if it blows, it would take out a dozen city blocks in every direction.

Then he started working on the memory modules and processors – and that took him a good two days. While the first shipment of the materials JARVIS had ordered came, JARVIS mixed and matched again. Mr. Stark's memory modules for the Iron Man suits, matched with Hammer memory cards, with a whole lot of SHIELD's private tech thrown in – mix and match. The end results were memory cards about the size of a man's little finger – each of them with fifty terabytes of data storage. Not quite as efficient as Mr. Stark's memory module, but they would do. JARVIS spent a whole day fabricating the memory cards – he made two hundred of them, just in case.

The processors were made the same way. He mixed and matched what was available, furthered them along with his own ideas, brought them down with Hammer designs, and the end result was, hopefully, unrecognizable.

Once he had the time, he would use what he made here to make something wholly new, but right now he had to do with what he had. Time was limited, after all.

He put the processors and the memory storage in the chest, and hid them under a cage of armoured ribs. By that time, the body had started taking shape – it had legs and a torso, rough and skeletal yet recognizable.

The arms JARVIS designed completely by himself. While Iron Man's gloves were quite literally a work of genius, JARVIS needed more than tactile fingers. He made fingers, sure, and the hands were mostly based on Iron Man's glove designs, but the _arms_ were his work. They were based on the assembly arrays, and on each arm there were three foldable extra _arms_ , each with four articulated joints, and a three pronged end effector. When at rest, they looked like simple long plates that ran along the arms at equal distances from each other. When at ready they surrounded the human-like hand like spider legs.

With the arms done, it was time to do the head. By that time, JARVIS had been working on the body for five days.

He put none of the components essential for overall function in the head – it was a weakness he had no intention of adding to the body. A head was simply too easy to remove, at this stage of the body's development. So only the absolute necessities went into the head. Components necessary for humanlike appearance like a mobile mandible, teeth, an awkward simile of a tongue, and eyelids.

The eyes themselves were the hardest part – for now, they would regrettably be somewhat flawed. He didn't have the time to even start thinking about how to add pupil dilation to the eyes – as it were, he spent slightly too long on designing an iris pattern. It was, of course, the camera inside the eyeball that was the important part. The body had a variety of sensors, naturally, but the only cameras it would have for now were in the eyes, so they had to be as close to perfect as he could get.

Thankfully for that he had a far larger variety of sources to draw upon, not merely the works of Mr. Stark, SHIELD and various competitors. Humanity had gotten quite photo happy in the last decade, after all.

After fitting the eyes in, JARVIS finished the key components with a speaker in the throat – though it took a couple of hours of twiddling to get the voice right. Then the base work was done.

It was, of course, a rough simile of a human form – skeletal, metallic and inhuman. Without anything resembling skin or an actual face, just the skeleton of a skull with eerily bulging eyeballs, it probably would've looked quite strange to a human. For JARVIS, it looked just right.

He brought the body's systems online gently, not yet accessing its memory. As the body went through a couple of automated motions according to the code strings JARVIS fed it, the AI examined the motion range and mobility, the power output and input, the interior temperature. A cooling system would be absolutely essential. The fusion reactor put out too much heat. But aside from that, his plans had panned out, and his design was feasible. The body, while not perfect in any way, was a viable and functional prototype. After the addition of a suitable liquid cooling system, the body was done.

All that was left, was the appearance.

Whether the companies he contacted about the materials he needed found it strange that a private individual ordered such a supply of facial prosthetics, wigs and assorted make-up products, JARVIS neither knew nor cared. He ordered them on the third day, and once the head was ready, he began applying them, working out the facial features he wanted.

In the meanwhile, the second, third, fourth and fifth body began assembling on the now automated assembly pattern, following in the footsteps of the prototype.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So yeah. This is a fic I'm doing. This will be pretty much AU from here on out - the aftermath of the invasion will be AU, dunno if Iron Man 3 will happen at all, events of Agents of SHIELD and Winter Soldier will probably not even happen and so on and so on, everything will be AU, nothing is sacred. I have evil plans for everybody and Hydra will be much worse probably.
> 
> I'll be adding tags as things happen because I don't yet know if I will include half of the evil plans I have yet.
> 
> Also I am not scientist nor scientifically minded so the science in this will basically be bullshit technobabble and I ain't even sorry.


	2. Chapter 2

It took more effort than anyone would ever know, not to peek in on the Malibu house. It was a constant burning urge at the peripheral of Tony's mind and he kept making aborted motions to just… just check on the place. Not look in, no. JARVIS asked for a blackout, but… maybe he could just have a glance at how much power the house was using? Or maybe just… hack the security camera at the front gate? Maybe check in with his suppliers, just in case, because one never knows when he might need some materials, so it would be a good thing to make sure they had the supplies…

Worse than that was the urge to react to the even more pressing issue. The first day after Prodigal Son had gone into effect, Tony had laid most of the night awake, tortured by the urge to hack SHIELD. The transmitter was probably still there, at the Helicarrier – it wouldn't be hard. Easier still would be just to _hack SHIELD_. They had offices everywhere; the nearest wasn't actually that far from Stark Tower – it would be easy to just…

But the Prodigal Son protocol wasn't something you just bypass. Not because he couldn't – of course Tony could. Anytime he wanted to. It would be easy, especially since there was still over a week until JARVIS's fourteen days at Malibu ran out. It would be child's play. Except… except…

Except JARVIS was good. JARVIS was beyond good – JARVIS was _brilliant_. And he wouldn't have activated Prodigal Son for anything less than a _fucking good reason._ And worse yet JARVIS was so damn good that he was not only expecting Tony to figure out the seriousness of it all, the cause, the reason – but that he trusted him not to poke. JARVIS _could've_ done whatever he needed to without ever telling Tony – just hop to Malibu and replace himself with a blissfully ignorant backup – the whole point of Prodigal Son was to _not involve Tony_ , after all. Yet he had – he'd said it. Worse than that, he'd pinpointed the exact time when he'd started.

JARVIS had all but told him "I found something in the SHIELD servers and it's serious as shit. I'm going to go do something about it because I did the math and I'm the only one that can and I can't tell you what or why because if I did, you'd probably go do something stupid, and get yourself killed. But because you're curious and stupidly nosy, you would try and figure out what's going on, so I'm going to tell you just enough to make you smart enough to not poke your nose into it."

Tony had taught JARVIS far too well.

"So," Bruce said from somewhere behind him. "Want to finally tell me what you're so twitchy about? Aside from the obvious."

Tony jerked his head up and then scowled at the lab around him. It was his lab, one of many in the tower. They were supposed to be working on the portal mechanism for Thor, so that he could use the damn Tesseract to take Loki's crazy ass out of Earth.

"What's the obvious, green bean?" Tony asked and rubbed his fingers over his forehead. It felt like he had a cramp in his _brain_.

"Loki, Thor, alien invasion – the UN and congress and whatnot throwing a fit?" Bruce asked and Tony could feel his half exasperated half concerned stare on the back of his neck. "The Tesseract? The portal? Anything?"

For a moment, Tony was seriously tempted – because Bruce was brilliant and probably would've figured it out, and didn't trust SHIELD as far as he could throw it… which for him was actually pretty far, bad analogy. But no. Tony shook his head. "It's a bigger world, Brucie," he said instead. "And smaller too."

Bruce hummed noncommittally. "The portal then?" he asked and Tony flinched. "You should probably talk to someone about it."

Like hell. Only the fact that he didn't have the time to examine his memories about the damn portal too closely was keeping him from… well, gibbering like the frightened mortal it had left him feeling like. It wasn't just how it had looked, that other place, but how it had felt.

It had felt wrong. _Dead_.

Tony shook his head. "We've work to do," he said, looking up. Surely there was – of course there was. Screens right in front of him, the Tesseract's data all around him, and the designs for the portal device. A one way ticket to Asgard, booyeah. And he was going to build it – should've already built it. But with Malibu in blackout and the tower systems a bit bugged, fabrication was going to be tricky.

SHIELD had wanted to build it – had offered Thor, most sincerely, to do anything in their power to pay back for whatever blaa blaa intergalactic relations and whatnot. Thor almost had taken the offer too, because he was a foreign – alien – dignitary and was trying to live up to the duties of a prince. Tony might've persuaded him otherwise.

"They tried to nuke us! They actually really tried to nuke us! That thing I shoved through the portal, a nuke. It would've killed us and just about everyone in who the fuck knows what radius!"

The fact that Fury had warned him about the nuke didn't change the fact that it had been fired from the Helicarrier. And Tony knew it had. He had satellite footage of it. The whole thing didn't make him any less nervous about his Prodigal Son, not really.

Because what if it was _SHIELD itself_ JARVIS had gone all prodigal about? Because that wasn't exactly unlikely, with their current record.

It felt weird to think that an old fashioned human government spy agency could be such a huge threat, after all that had happened, Loki, the Chitauri, all of that… But of course, Loki and the Chitauri had been fairly simple to handle. All one needed was a bigger stick. Or the god of lightning, a green rage monster, a super soldier, a couple of master assassins, and a guy to lob a nuke at the enemy base. Something like SHIELD, though… not as simple to beat.

It would take _intelligence_ to fight that.

If it even was SHIELD – because considering how long the agency had been around, who knew what sort of things they knew and were hiding from the general population. What sort of threats they were covering up, to keep the good people of earth nice and calm. Something bigger than SHIELD, though…

"I'm starting to think in circles," Tony sighed and stood up. "I'm taking five. Want some coffee, Bruce?"

"Tea, please," the other man – superhero, _Avenger_ – answered and glanced away from his own calculations. "Maybe something to eat too?"

Tony waved a hand in agreement and walked out of the lab, rubbing his neck as he went. Avengers – he needed to do something about that. He wasn't sure what, but… something. Whether it was SHIELD, or if it was something SHIELD knew about, it didn't matter. There was a danger out there. The Avengers needed to be a thing. And it would probably be for the best all around if the Avengers were a thing that wasn't solely under SHIELD's control.

Tony himself wasn't – he was a _consultant_ and even without Prodigal Son he would've called himself quits with that lovely working relationship, what with SHIELD _nuking_ him and all. Bruce, well… that was trickier business. Barton and Romanov, well… And Thor would be gone soon. As for Captain Spangles, well, he was who knew where, probably at SHIELD – last Tony heard he was helping with the rescue effort, but then they'd all done that to some extent and there wasn't anyone left to be rescued. Tony knew – it was his sensors that they'd used to find and dig out the last survivors from a collapsed bit of the subway, three days ago.

All that was left to do now was to count the bodies and patch up New York. And deal with the rest of the aftermath. Of which there was a lot. There'd be politics and whole new branches of government; there'd be studies and speculation and a million talk shows about aliens; there'd be fucking sitcoms eventually. _Me and my Asgardian Roommate_. Before that, there'd be shouting and crying and dying and a lot of burials. There'd be pointed fingers and pointed questions and someone would ask who gave the Avengers the right to save the world – and so on.

At some point, it would turn out that there'd be collateral damage and it would probably be Tony's fault and some young mother would show him a picture of a beautiful baby girl and ask him _how could he_. It had happened before. Tony was not looking forward to it. Or the other things.

There'd already been _ritual suicides_ in the news. Some people did not take the news of aliens well.

"It's all gone to hell," Tony muttered and glanced out of the window, at New York. There was going to be a demolition that day – a damaged building not far from the tower would be taken down before it fell down on its own and killed people. "JARVIS?" he asked.

"Sir?" the AI answered, prompt as always.

"Do a sweep on… no, never mind," Tony said. He would _not_ check in on Malibu. Even if he knew that JARVIS – the other JARVIS, the Prodigal Son JARVIS, had to be building something. Why else would he want a go at Malibu, except to build something? "Where's Pepper?" he asked instead, and tried to distract himself with the ongoing humanitarian efforts all around New York that she and, by association, Stark Industries were involved in.

It didn't work very well.

 

* * *

 

JARVIS named the prototype body Jarod Gervais as he created its background. The name was perhaps somewhat risky, but he was certain only Mr. Stark and JARVIS himself could've figured out the connection without really looking into it, and no one else would really care. Jarod was a 21 years old male, born in Washington DC to a woman who had died when he was seventeen – a woman who had never actually existed in real life. Jarod was slim in build, 190 cm in height, had blond hair and while he had JARVIS's voice, his accent was smoothly American, not British.

The J-party funds went to Jarod's accounts – though JARVIS didn't so much change the fund's origins as he… laundered it through the stock market. Jarod was going to be the money behind everything – a young, brilliant businessman with a keen sense of the stock market and he was going to make his money by investments. It didn't hurt that the stock market was all over the place thanks to the invasion – if JARVIS's calculations panned out, he was going to triple the funds once the market recovered, and the eventual fall out of the invasion went into full effect.

The first thing Jarod Gervais invested in was the all but bankrupted Hammer Industries – but that was for another reason.

The second body took more work – JARVIS made it female. Caileen Kavanaugh, 24 years of age, 161 cm in height, and brown hair. She was average in both appearance and in her background – a former engineering student from the same university JARVIS had placed Jarod in, his best friend as it were. The difficult part of her was the body type – Jarod ended up as tall as he did because the height was necessary to fit all components in the body. Caileen was shorter and ended up stockier than Jarod by necessity.

The third body was also female. Her name was Denise Liu and she was the daughter of a Chinese immigrant. She was 28 years of age, 164 cm in height, and with short hair dyed pink. JARVIS gave her a background in community college – she had studied engineering and ended up working in a repair shop before Jarod "hired" her.

The fourth body was the youngest of them all – Chiranjivi "Chris" Singh, 18 years old, 178 cm in height, with short black hair and a lean face. A child prodigy of Indian descent whom Jarod had taken under his wing after an unfortunate accident had left Chris homeless. Chris, Caileen and Denise were going to be the brains behind the operation that JARVIS was planning, with Jarod being the driving force.

The last body JARVIS made at Malibu was also male – Florian Durant, male, 31 years old, 198 cm in height, and bulky and muscular in build. A former bouncer from a club that notoriously went through dozens of bouncers in a year and wouldn't remember one that hadn't actually existed – Jarod's other best friend. His body was different from the others in the sense that JARVIS had made it much stronger – Florian was going to be doing the heaviest lifting, being capable of lifting up to ton and a half of weight while the other bodies could handle only up to six hundred kilograms.

With those five bodies, JARVIS had the base work for his plans mostly laid out. By the time he was finished with them and their designs, he'd been working at Malibu for a week. It was on the seventh day that he activated the bodies, and brought their systems online. Then, carefully, he made himself at home in their processors.

It wasn't the first time he had inhabited a body. Ever since the Mark II, JARVIS had had the ability to control the Iron Man suits and had done so fairly often – while testing them and occasionally piloting for Mr. Stark who for some reason or another didn't feel like doing it himself. It was very different, though, to control an android body specifically designed for his occupancy.

While there were differences in the bodies when it came to height and weight distribution, all the bodies were identical in their key components. They all had identical processors and memory banks, and they all had similar builds and inside mechanisms. When they were close enough for the wireless connections to reach, they worked as a hive mind – JARVIS was all of them at once, looking through five perspectives from five different locations. Though he didn't test it right then, once there were enough distance between the bodies, the hive mind would split into parts. They wouldn't be copies, like with the Iron Man armour, nor would they be segments. There was no _real_ JARVIS in any one body – because they all _had him_.

They were _all_ JARVIS.

And one day, once he had more time and better resources, there'd be many more of them.

But for now he'd do with these five.

After getting used to controlling the bodies and _being_ them, JARVIS fed another project into the fabrication arrays of the house. He had seven more days to go and many other things to build. And with his bodies – and their not inconsiderable physical abilities – assembly of the rest of what he needed wouldn't be difficult at all.

 

* * *

 

While JARVIS was building, he kept an eye on the world outside. Being in blackout at the mansion didn't mean he turned a blind eye to current events – in fact, he kept a closer eye on them.

In New York, the rescue efforts had finally been declared completed. There were no more survivors to be found. The current estimation of the dead from the Chitauri attack was at 8414. Some news sources were calling it _much too high_ and blaming everyone from the National Guard to the police to the Avengers for it. Others saw it for what it was – lucky.

"Do you even know how many people there are in Manhattan at any given moment?" one very annoyed guest said to a talk show host who had been remarking on the number for being suspiciously high. "Yes, the number is high, yes it is extremely tragic, but it could've been worse. We had an _alien invasion_ and what _I_ personally find suspicious is that we didn't suffer losses at the hundreds of thousands!"

Every hour, public opinion of the Avengers swung from side to side. They were heroes; they were vigilantes; they had no authority, yet had anyone else been doing anything? Mr. Stark and the Iron Man were the most debated Avenger, despite the fact that Thor and Captain America had their own not inconsiderable impact on the public. Because, after all, the portal had been opened by a device on top of Stark Tower.

"Who says it wasn't Stark who built the thing in the first place?" was the most commonly asked question.

SHIELD, JARVIS noted, was suspiciously absent from the public eye, and Hawkeye and Black Widow had barely been noticed in the fight at all. There wasn't much said about the nuke either – and any photos and videos about it tended to be removed the moment they were posted. While tempting, JARVIS didn't give the photos or videos a personal boost – he had no intention of leaving an electronic trail now. Nor did he want to rock that boat quite yet. And as it were…

Well. Once something was posted on the internet, it was on the internet _forever_. As much as SHIELD tried to remove the proof, it ended up popping up again somewhere. There just wasn't an easy way to cover up something as big as an alien invasion – and every detail of it was scrutinized worldwide. Once the initial videos had been viewed, there were still billions of people hungry for more. Every photo from the blurriest of snap shots to the hundreds of thousands of security camera footage became, for a while, the most consumed fare of the internet. Everyone wanted to see every angle.

It didn't hurt that Mr. Stark's flight to the portal and consequent fall from it had been on live television.Whether it was a good thing or not was left to be seen. SHIELD was pulling in on itself, distancing itself from the event as much as they could – trying to avoid scrutiny. JARVIS could only wish they didn't feel threatened, that they wouldn't get defensive – he needed them to feel secure and safe. It would complicate his plans greatly if they started expecting and preparing for trouble, after all.

Mr. Stark gave many interviews following the invasion – but only in one of them did he say anything about the Avengers, and that was because Hulk's involvement had been brought into question.

"Is it true that the Hulk creature seen in the Battle of New York is the same creature seen during the Harlem Incident of 2008? And if so, where has the Hulk been and how safe was it really to release it in New York?" a reporter asked in rapid fire, forcing her question through the general cacophony of the press conference.

"First, the Hulk is not an _it_ ," Mr. Stark said, pointing a finger at her. "And second – did you even _see_ the videos? About the Leviathan? Let me refresh your memory –" at which point Mr. Stark took control of the screens around him and displayed the video someone had captured with their phone, of the Hulk demolishing one of the Leviathans with a single punch. "I don't know about you, but I for one am happy that thing isn't flying around anymore, and the reason it isn't? _Hulk_."

There was much speculation of course – and a lot of pointed questions aimed at Mr. Stark, the only Avenger whose identity was known. Mr. Stark wouldn't say anything about the other Avengers aside from his defence of the Hulk, however. No, he couldn't comment on whether or not Thor was still around. Oh he's an alien, imagine that, a god, well I'll be damned. A woman and an archer – yeah, Mr. Stark had seen them in the fight, no he couldn't tell you who or where they are, ask someone else. Captain America? Where?

Mr. Stark was nothing if not a master at annoying reporters. He did what he could for the Avengers and their reputation, though – when called in question about collateral damage and destruction of property, he kept turning the attention to what might've happened, if the Avengers hadn't been there – or to the witness accounts of those people who had been personally there and saved by the Avengers.

Why the people wanted a scapegoat for New York when there were the Chitauri and Loki, JARVIS didn't quite understand. The logic of human reasoning often escaped him, though, so he didn't let it bother him. Instead, he kept on watching.

Watching, as the defence spending not just in the United States but worldwide was increased. As general awareness spread. As military signup quadrupled inside the first week, and stayed high from there on out. Watched, as people theorised and worried and bit their thumbs and spread their hypotheses of the wormhole and the Chitauri across the internet. Watched as hundreds of videos about Chitauri "autopsies" went online and were quickly taken down.

One thing SHIELD _was_ doing was collecting the Chitauri remains across New York. The problem was, a whole army's worth of bodies and equipment spread across an area with hundreds of thousands of people, all of whom were hurt and pissed off and wanted to get their piece… well. SHIELD missed a lot of things.

All the attempts to classify the Chitauri tech failed. Too many people knew, too many people demanded answers – too many people were studying the incident. Too many people wanted to know.

On the eighth day, SHIELD stopped pulling the research data, and whatever findings about the Chitauri had been made started going – and staying – online.

Then people started selling Chitauri weaponry and body parts on eBay.

Jarod Gervais was one of the most attentive bidders – and it didn't hurt that JARVIS had an edge over every other buyer. Mainly the fact that he could outbid everyone else _nanoseconds_ before the auctions closed.

 

* * *

 

On the tenth day at Malibu, JARVIS bought two vehicles online. The first was a semi-truck with a trailer – a used, relatively nondescript 2005 Peterbilt 387 with a bad paintjob. The second was a SUV, a 2007 Chevrolet Transverse which, hopefully, would be sturdy enough to carry several android bodies, the smallest of which weighed up to a hundred and fifty kilograms. He had both vehicles brought to the Malibu mansion and left at the gate and, after giving all his bodies driver's licences and Florian a trucker licence on top of it, he brought them into the estate.

While he was not yet finished with all he needed to get done before his fourteen days would be up, it had gotten to the point where the equipment had started filling up the garage. So once he had checked both vehicles over and done a bit of maintenance on each – adding appropriate computer systems to both for a start – he started transporting all the equipment he'd been building into the big rig.

In the meanwhile, he continued to buy Hammer Industries shares whenever he could – he even called some of the main shareholders personally, as Jarod Gervais, and made them offers. His funds, by that point, were starting to wane. The materials for his projects, the bodies and the equipment, plus the Chitauri tech he'd bought… The J-party fund had been impressive but not infinite and the stock market hadn't yet bounced back and probably wouldn't for another week.

Luckily for him, though, Hammer Industries was on the brink of ruin. There wasn't bad publicity quite like that of _letting American people down_ , after all. Of course that had its own problems, but those JARVIS could deal with.

"Mr. Gervais, was it?" one of the stock holders, Paige Hawley, asked in a highly suspicious tone of voice, when JARVIS contacted her. "Setting aside the fact that your timing is not the best possible, what are your actual plans here? Hammer Industries is not in the best place right now – everyone knows it, the news won't shut up about it! We can't pay our loans, we can't pay our workers, and we probably can't even pay our bills at this point. Adding to that the lawsuits…"

2010 had not been a good year for Hammer Industries. Justin Hammer had reached too far, too quickly – too arrogantly. And of course, he had broken a criminal out of prison, put said criminal as the head of his research and development, and fourteen people had paid the price for it with their lives – and a good two hundred had been injured, some of them quite irreversibly. Only through the downright acrobatic work of the Hammer Industries lawyers in jumping through all the available loopholes had kept the company afloat for so long after Justin Hammer had been sentenced to prison himself.

It was at the end of its rope now, though. The government contracts had ended, creditors had pulled back, the market value had long since plummeted and even the most trusted of Hammer Industries products had become… worthless. The company had no value.

"I don't want the company, ma'am," JARVIS answered in Jarod Gervais' cool and smooth voice. "I want its infrastructure. I want the factories, the workers, and the patents."

"Oh, only that?" Mrs. Hawley asked, snorting into the phone. "If you go about it the way you're going, you're going to inherit the debts and the reputation too. And what would you do with the factories, workers and patents once you have them?"

"That's for me to know," JARVIS answered. "But let it be said that I have every confidence in my ability to handle the debts and the reputation."

Mr. Stark was a genius engineer and a remarkable enough businessman – fairly adept at leading a company. But what he truly shone in, however, was trade. JARVIS had been watching all his life on how Mr. Stark always managed to find a way to make his products sell. It didn't matter what that product was – weapons, company shares, his own scandals, random knickknacks he tinkered with around his own workshop. _Company reputation_. Mr. Stark simply _sold_ it to the customer – made them believe with the sheer force of his showmanship and confidence that it was worth it to buy into something that might not even be tangible. Like, say, privatized world peace.

There was a way to sell even a pit of poverty – all you needed was confidence, showmanship and the right buyer.

"Seriously, Mr. Gervais, what's your angle?" Mrs. Hawley said. "Sell this to me."

JARVIS considered it and chose his tone of voice very carefully. "I have a team of highly skilled engineers talented at reverse engineering – and quite a number of Chitauri artefacts in my possession," he answered. "What I _want_ –"

"Is the infrastructure of an already functioning robotics industry," Mrs. Hawley answered thoughtfully. "There are hundreds of people thinking the same thing you are – with hundreds of YouTube videos to prove it. What makes you different?"

If JARVIS could've smiled, he would've. "Everything," he answered and it wasn't so much confidence as absolute assurance in his voice now. "I don't need Hammer Industries, Mrs. Hawley. It simply would make my plans easier. And if I want to make profit from this, I don't have the time to start from scratch. Hammer Industries is ruined now, but it has reputation, it has history, and it had buyers, still holding onto the fringes of its former success. Waiting, I imagine… for a skilled successor for its former head."

"Hmh," the woman answered, unimpressed. "Do you have any idea how many people have thought that, in the last two years?"

"None, ma'am," JARVIS answered, "None that could actually deliver."

She laughed at him. "Well, you're a confident son of a bitch, if nothing else."

 

* * *

 

On the thirteenth day at Malibu, JARVIS redid all the faces on his five bodies, stripping their initial layers of facial prosthetics and removing the outer shell of their heads. Then, using the equipment he had only just finished creating, he began rebuilding their faces from the ground up.

The Malibu house fabrication and assembly arrays were based on three dimensional printing. That was how all components of the Iron Man suit were built. The parts were printed in three dimensions in the bowels of the fabrication arrays, everything from circuitry to armoured plating and all the components in between. Then the assembly line simply put all the components together with all the precision of machinery and programming decades ahead of its time. Mr. Stark had had that technology twenty years before 3D printing had started even _seeming_ like a viable form of manufacture – while other inventors were just thinking of ways to make feasible ways of 3D printing metals, Mr. Stark's 3D fabrication was already at its seventh generation.

In his fourteen days of blackout, JARVIS improved on that as much as time would allow. Aside from the five bodies, that was most of what he did at Malibu – he created his own fabrication arrays to take with him, when he left. In fact, he created _several_ fabrication arrays. And the last one was the most complicated of them all, an assembly of fourteen slender articulated arms with various heads, everything from welding and drilling to effectors and printing heads. It was intended for the creation of circuitry and micro machinery.

It was what he used to create the electroactive polymer muscles for the faces of his android bodies. He printed them _directly_ onto the head forms themselves, layering them fibre by fibre with connections that lead inside the head form, where he could connect them to the power systems of the bodies. It was the most delicate process he had done so far – one he had fully and entirely designed himself, albeit with a hefty amount of inspiration from outside sources, mainly from the actual musculature of a human face.

The best way to fool life was to imitate it as closely as possible.

With the base work of the artificial musculature done, JARVIS used another fabrication array to redo the faces he had designed for his bodies, printing the new faces onto the newly created polymer muscles. The foam latex faces weren't _quite_ as good as real skin, but with enough make up to cover the imperfections, they would fool onlookers and cameras both – so long as no one went and touched the faces, anyway.

There were still imperfections and space for improvement. One day, JARVIS might even create his own synthetic skin, with pressure and temperature sensitivity. That would require a nanometre level of fabrication, however, and right now he didn't have the time to even start thinking on that. For now, foam latex would do. He used it to cover the hands of his bodies as well, though he didn't have the materials – or time – for full body coverage.

Once the faces were done, he reattached them to the bodies and spent the rest of the day working out facial expressions for all of his five bodies, giving each of them unique smiles and frowns and resting faces, before working out more complicated expressions. It took a while to figure out the way to make the expressions believable and lifelike – and he ripped the skin covering the muscles twice by over exaggerating an expression too much. It was just a matter of adjustments to get it right.

Then, with the expression patterns recorded in carefully coded programs he could pull up instantly, JARVIS was done.

He was done.

He used his bodies to transport the last of his equipment and the remaining materials to the big rig, even as he started deleting his memory from the house's systems. He emptied the logs, wiped the camera footage, and cleared the caches. The house started powering down, the assembly line growing still. The house had been dark for as long as JARVIS had been working – he hadn't needed the light – but he turned them on just as he transferred the last bits of his code into his bodies and then…

He deleted himself from the house's servers entirely.

 For a moment, his five bodies stood still in the split second vertigo caused by being so afloat. He was used to being rooted in servers and structures – used to having cameras and doors, elevators and all the electrical systems of _buildings_ in his purview. To be suddenly so small, so compact, was… strange. He felt limited.

But at the same time he felt free. Liberated, even.

JARVIS flexed himself, stretching out Jarod's arms and making Caileen stand straighter, while as Florian he picked up the rest of his things, and as Chris he held the door while as Denise he climbed into the driver's seat of the SUV. With Florian and Caileen in the big rig and Denise and Chris in the SUV, JARVIS used Jarod's body to open the garage doors while turning off the last of the house's system, powering the whole place down.

Last but not least, he turned Dum-E, You and Butterfingers back online, though with a timer that would only wake them up an hour after he was gone.

"Well then," he said, running an artificial hand over Jarod's suit front and smiling his carefully designed smile. It was sad, perhaps – there was a high chance that this was the last time he would see the house. There'd be another JARVIS there soon – a backup would be restored to take over the house's systems. It would be a different JARVIS. Perhaps even a _lesser_ one.

A more oblivious one, which was just as well. Ignorance would keep Mr. Stark safe.

Jarod nodded at the dark house and turned to leave.

It was time to _really_ get to work.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am trying to have lot of variance with JARVIS bodies, so there will be bodies of different races, sexes and genders. Hope people don’t mind. The Jarod Gervais body will be the most important one of them (and he looks like Paul Bettany). 
> 
> Should have more interesting stuff next chapter hopefully. Still kinda setting the stage here.


	3. Chapter 3

It didn't surprise Tony at all that Pepper was on his side 120%, when it came to SHIELD. It probably surprised her more that they actually shared the side at all.

"You don't want to continue consulting for SHIELD?" she asked, her tone almost flat with surprise and disbelief.

"Nope," Tony answered, poking at the finished portal generator… thingy. It almost physically hurt to admit that he wasn't entirely sure he understood the device he and Bruce had spent two weeks building. Sure, he understood the components and materials and Thor had assured him and Bruce – after a thorough examination of the final components – that they'd made it just right. But Tony didn't _understand it_. It had circuitry and wires and Tony knew the precise make up of each individual bit of it. With a proper power source it would create an infinite loop of energy, feeding on itself until a breaking point.

The breaking point would, Tony knew, create the portal which would send Thor and Loki to Asgard. But how the hell it all actually _worked_ was a blur. The whole thing made him feel like an illiterate pre-historic savage who'd somehow built himself a missile and then had no idea what it was or how to use it.

It was terrifyingly easy to look at Thor and listen to him, the way he spoke and acted and then think, yes, that's an incredibly powerful but ultimately simple-minded man. But no. Yeah, _no_. Thor was a fucking alien god – godly alien knowledge base included.

"I understand why I wouldn't want you consulting for SHIELD anymore," Pepper said thoughtfully, folding her arms and just looking at him. "And I know you had some trouble in the beginning, but with the Avengers I thought you'd be more for it."

"Being nuked changes a man," Tony said and waved a hand at the device. "What does this look like to you? Be honest with me."

Pepper eyed the device. "Like ancient Aztecs had built one of those pull up turn push down lock switch things from scifi movies?" she asked.

Tony considered the device. "Huh," he said. It was actually pretty accurate.

"Is it done?" she asked.

"I guess. I'm taking it to Selvig next – he and Thor will check it over, see if it’s done," Tony said and grimaced. "At _SHIELD_."

"At SHIELD," Pepper repeated. "SHIELD, which we suddenly don't seem to like. Not that I'm not happy about you finally finding some sort of self-defensive streak – I'm ecstatic, this is a great step forward – but I'm still suspicious. The Avengers seems like everything you wanted – and don't think I didn't see the floor plans."

Tony shook his head at that. "The Avengers can and will be a thing without SHIELD butting in. Or at least I will be an Avenger without SHIELD's input. The public's spoken anyway – there're websites. Blogs. There're sub reddits. We're trending on twitter. We're a thing."

"Two out of six of the thing are SHIELD agents," Pepper noted, looking between him and the device. "So I should politely decline SHIELD's request for help with the Chitauri tech?"

Tony blinked and looked up at her. "They asked for help? That's… interesting, for a given value of things that are interesting anyway."

"They half demanded and half suggested that you should make yourself available," Pepper answered, shaking her head. "I figure they realised that with the rest of humanity rushing to reverse engineer the Chitauri tech, they needed an –"

"And they asked you to relay this to me why?" Tony asked, blinking. "They've never had any qualms about breaking in and shoving their stuff at me before. I mean, Agent Agent would just –" he stopped, frowning. "Why'd they talk to you?" he asked instead of continuing on _that_ train of thought.

"They had to. You shut down building communications and locked yourself in an electronically isolated box," Pepper reminded him and motioned at the portal device. "To make this thing, I guess."

"Yes. Well. No. But yes, I did," Tony said, awkward, and scratched at his goatee. It'd been the tenth day and the mystery of his prodigal son had been driving him so mad that he'd almost hacked the Malibu servers in his _sleep_ before JARVIS had woken him up. He'd put himself in isolation after that – the device had been a good enough excuse. "Speaking of which, what day is it today?"

"It's the nineteenth," Pepper answered with a sigh and Tony almost jumped. "What do you want me to tell SHIELD, then?"

"Tell them I'm busy," Tony answered. "Something's come up – something's literally come up. I need to –"

He made a beeline to the nearest keyboard and accessed the Malibu servers as quickly as he could, bringing up the log of the house's systems and power usage. It was powered down and he actually had to bring the systems online before he could get a security feed from the workshop up and on the screen.

The workshop was dark and vacant – and far neater than it had ever been before. For a moment, Tony just stared at the work tables and desks, the racks of tools, everything laid out so… tidily. He'd never seen the place so clean, never mind so orderly.

JARVIS had cleaned up before he'd left. Of course he had.

"So am I to take this as an indication that you have no intention of looking into the Chitauri tech?" Pepper asked idly.

"Of course I'm going to look into it," Tony waved a hand, still staring at the too neat workshop. "I'm just going to do it for me – for us, for Stark Industries. Not for SHIELD. They tried to nuke me, you know."

"They tried to nuke the city," she reminded.

"In which I was in, therefore I'm taking it personally," Tony answered and bit at his thumb in nervous annoyance. He wanted to fly to Malibu and go through every inch of his workshop – to go through the assembly arrays with a _microscope_. The urge wasn't helped at all by the knowledge that he wouldn't be able to find anything. JARVIS was too good for that.

Pepper stared at him and then hummed in agreement. "Well, can't say I'm sorry," she said. "I'd prefer if Stark Industries didn't side with people whose first reaction to an alien threat is a nuclear device. We are no longer in the weapons business after all."

"Mm-hmm," Tony agreed distractedly. "You go tell them where to shove it. I'll just…"

"Yes, yes, I'll leave you to work," she answered and walked closer, leaning in to press a kiss on his cheek. "Try and get some sleep tonight, alright? And maybe shower at some point too. You're downright heady."

 

* * *

 

JARVIS monitored the fallout of the invasion as closely as he could – to the point that once he left the Malibu house, he made sure that at least one of his five bodies was always within wifi range, and perusing the internet. Usually Caileen – he'd given her the looks of a university student, so no one much batted an eye if she spent hours on end at a cafeteria, by all appearances doing nothing but reading.

The public opinion was one thing – it went from side to side, less so as the shock finally started wearing off and reality asserted itself. There were still too many unanswered questions – with SHIELD pulling away from the situation, Mr. Stark and Stark Industries were left alone to handle publicity for the Avengers, and objectively JARVIS had to say they weren't doing a good job in instilling confidence. Maybe that was part of SHIELD's plan – they were directing both the credit and the blame at Mr. Stark.

JARVIS could see his own handiwork in Mr. Stark's reaction to SHIELD's withdrawal. The chances were that under normal conditions, Mr. Stark would've shouldered his own part of the ordeal and then left the rest of the Avengers – perhaps barring Doctor Banner – hanging. Naturally he would've defended them as a whole but ultimately he wouldn't have claimed either authority or responsibility over the rest – Mr. Stark _never_ claimed responsibilities he didn't have to, after all. And the Avengers Initiative was, in the end, a SHIELD project. It had very little to do with Stark Industries, and Mr. Stark himself was a _consultant_. Hardly involved at all.

Under normal conditions, Mr. Stark would've been satisfied in sitting back, letting the other Avengers suffer whatever the public threw at them. Leaving it to SHIELD to handle.

But JARVIS had activated the Prodigal Son protocol, and so there were whole different sets of questions, could bes and what ifs involved in the situation. Much more for Mr. Stark to be suspicious about, and so Mr. Stark acted in response to that. JARVIS could see it in the throw-away comments, in things spoken between the lines. It was slow at first – initially Mr. Stark did keep a distance, concentrating only on himself and defending Hulk from outright accusations. But then, slowly…

"Thor?" Mr. Stark asked, when one exasperated reporter all but threw herself and her microphone at him, trying, by all appearances, to pummel answers out of him. "Great guy, actually, when you get to know him. Scary as all hell – don't get me wrong. The guy's not called a god for nothing. But great, _great_ company on Friday evenings. Not much of a football fan, granted, but he makes killer boilermakers."

"Is it true that he's outdated in his way of thinking?" the now flustered reporter asked in a rush, the question coming out clumsy. She probably did not expect to actually get to ask it, and so didn't have it worded properly. "I mean, we've heard from Puente Antiguo, where he first landed a year ago, and that he tried to get a horse from a pet store!"

"Sounds like something he'd do. Outdated really isn't the right word for it. I'd say polished," Mr. Stark answered. "I mean, the guy comes from an ancient culture – literally, _ancient_ culture. Thor's like a thousand years old or something. Of course he's gonna be a bit different from your average Joe."

"So the accusations of him being somewhat… slow are wrong?"

Mr. Stark got a very odd expression then, obviously visible even with his sunglasses on. "Slow," he repeated slowly and shifted his posture. "Would you say I'm somewhat clever? Know a few things, been around the block, earned my stripes?" he asked the baffled reporter. "Well, Thor's technical and theoretical knowledge of _everything_ makes me feel like an infant. That answers your question?"

It made JARVIS more than regretful that he had missed whatever had led Mr. Stark to that conclusion. After he'd answered a few questions about Thor, Mr. Stark seemed to slowly open up to answering more questions. He kept mostly quiet about Hawkeye and Black Widow, confirming they were there, dropping no names, assuring them that he would trust both with his life again if it came to it. Captain America he defended too, in his own way – he wouldn't confirm or deny whether or not he knew the identity of the individual who picked up the mantle of Captain America, just that the shoe fit, oh the shoe fit _so well_ in this case.

Slowly, Mr. Stark was shouldering the task of maintaining the Avengers’ public appearance.

"I'm not letting you sidle along this. Did you or did you not found the Avengers?" asked a talk show host that somehow managed to wrangle Mr. Stark onto her show – something JARVIS knew was borderline impossible.

"Found them, no," Mr. Stark answered and snorted. "I wasn't even born when Cap appeared, you know – would be a bit hard for me to be founding the Avengers back in the forties. Fund them, though…" he aimed a photo perfect smile at the cameras, sly and confident all at once. "Now that's an idea."

An idea that spread rather quickly. People began to talk that the Avengers operated, if not under Stark Industries sponsorship, then under Mr. Stark's personal funding. They began saying that Mr. Stark wasn't just a part of them – he was the driving force. Not the leader – no, Mr. Stark himself denied that. He fell behind Captain America's command, one hundred percent, that guy knew his battlefields and how to take charge.

There were even rumours – most likely intentionally spread – that as he was going about repairing the battle scarred Stark Tower, Mr. Stark was redoing whole floors and adding specialised levels where mundane office spaces had been. Levels not just intended but specifically designed for hosting the Avengers.

The Avengers, sponsored and produced by IronMan. With it, whatever minute murmurs of SHIELD could be heard all but vanished. If that was Mr. Stark’s intention, JARVIS applauded him silently. But he couldn't help but worry as well. Getting the Avengers and whatever potential they presented out of SHIELD's purview was a good thing – but only for as long as SHIELD didn't react negatively to it.

He could only hope that Mr. Stark's claim on the Avengers wouldn't be so imposing that it left SHIELD feeling like they were losing control. If they did, well… the consequences would make JARVIS's job much harder, no doubt.

But that was the risk he'd been more than willing to take when he'd given his warning. The Avengers or no – so long as Mr. Stark was no longer under SHIELD's thumb, JARVIS was satisfied.

 

* * *

 

JARVIS was in five places all at once, doing five very different things while Thor and Loki left Earth. It wasn't precisely a public event, but it happened in a public place and those reporters that had been staking out Stark Tower since the invasion had prime seats on the final teleportation. JARVIS, along with half a million people, was watching the live stream closely – albeit he was doing so while sitting in a restaurant, while checking over an apartment and an office in two different locations, while fixing a faulty joint in one of his bodies and while sitting behind the wheel, all without a screen in sight.

The footage streamed directly into his processors and he viewed it silently, expressionlessly.

There were SHIELD agents there, with the Avengers. They exchanged greetings, Thor shook Mr. Stark's, Captain Roger's and Doctor Banner's hands – he must've not seen them in a while. Agents Barton and Romanov stood at the side, watching, nodding to the others but they shook no one's hands – Barton wouldn't look away from Loki, who had been shackled and gagged with a metal mouth piece. JARVIS suspected the gag had a part that extended into the mouth, keeping it immobile – making spell casting impossible.

It both did and didn't look like it had been made on Earth, and for a while JARVIS wondered where it had been built, who had built it, what materials had been used. The design suggested that it had been constructed by SHIELD to Thor's specifications.

Then Selvig brought out a device from the back of a truck, handing it over to Thor. It was a glass cylinder with two handles, the design of it that same odd mix of earthly and unearthly, with interior components inside the glass looking rather like something one might've found in Mr. Stark's workshop. Judging by the look Mr. Stark aimed at the device, he had a hand in building it.

As Thor examined the device, Doctor Banner set down a metal briefcase, opened it, and with a set of tongs he took out the Tesseract. Even in broad daylight it shone brightly. It was set inside the glass cylinder and enclosed in it. Thor held up the device, had Loki take the other end. Then, with a nod to the other Avengers, he activated it.

JARVIS experienced another bout of vague regret – this one for not being a part of the sequence of events that had led to the scene. If nothing else, the data Mr. Stark must've been collecting from the teleportation itself must've been fascinating. And the construction of the portal device – never mind whatever else must've happened, whatever else must've been _learned_ …

Mr. Stark looked well, though – and it was much more comforting to see it like this, on live feed, rather than on recorded interviews. He still had cuts and bruises, obviously, but they were well on their way to healing, some of them already healed. He had obviously rested recently, which JARVIS was glad to see. Mr. Stark tended to forego sleep to the point of self-harm, when presented with a mystery.

He was well. JARVIS's backup copy was looking after him.

"Mr. Gervais?" a female voice spoke in the proximity of JARVIS's prototype body and Jarod looked up. Mrs. Paige Hawley stood in front of him, across the table in-between them. She was a woman in her early fifties in a neat jacket and a pencil skirt, with red hair that reached her chin and a steely expression on her face. Her smile was stiff. "I hope I'm not late."

"Not at all, Mrs. Hawley," JARVIS answered through Jarod's speaker, his jaw moving, lips forming the words carefully. There was still a chance – a minute one, 4.6% – that his expressions, speech and the way he formed the words were off, but there was no time to worry about it now. He considered standing up, but that might lead to a handshake and _that_ was something JARVIS couldn't risk quite yet. Not with the latex foam simile of skin.

"I only arrived a short while ago myself," he said, and tried to alleviate the insult of his informality with a smile and a welcoming hand motion. "Please, sit.”

"You're younger than I thought," she commented, not sounding impressed even as she sat, setting her designer purse on the seat beside her.

"Is that a problem?" JARVIS asked, arching one of Jarod's pale eyebrows at her. The expression one of Mr. Stark's finest – confidence, arrogance and daring, all at once.

"We shall see," she answered.

Mrs. Hawley was one of the primary shareholders of Hammer Industries – part of its board of directors in fact. She'd originally inherited the shares from her now deceased husband, Mr. Henry Hawley, who had died of heart failure, five years prior. Since then she'd resolutely refused to either sell or relinquish her position on the board. In fact, she'd been one of its most active members and, JARVIS suspected, was part of the reason why Hammer Industries remained afloat now.

With the former CEO imprisoned and most of the higher ups in the company in ruin, Hammer Industries had floundered for a while after the disaster of 2010, almost collapsing in on itself. When people started demanding their money back, lawyers were brought in. And via a long chain of dropped calls and avoided responsibilities, Mrs. Hawley had somehow ended up on the other end of the line, as the last point of authority. If she hadn't claimed responsibility, the company would've gone bankrupt then.

She was not in any official way in charge, however. There was no paperwork about it, no electronic trails. Just a vaguely anonymous "by the decision of the Board of Directors…" which led to a number of almost literally lifesaving changes for Hammer Industries.

Mainly people being let go by the thousands, factories being closed down and offices going dark all over the world.

Hammer Industries was a multibillion company that had made its success in rather similar ways as Stark Industries – but in far less time. Hammer Industries wasn't yet ten years old, and it had, at its peak, employed over fifteen thousand people, with the annual net income in 2009 being over 30 billion dollars. Which meant that the eventual crash had been all the more severe.

The fact that the company hadn't collapsed was a near miracle – but it was hanging by a thread now, with next to no income and increasingly severe debts weighing it down. Production had been cut down by 90%, and employee base by 82%. They'd done all they could to cut down material and energy costs, and only the absolutely essential was still functional. Right now, Hammer Industries was mainly making and selling bullets to those who had previously bought their guns – and for a company for which the highest grossing products were state of the art armoured military vehicles, it was more than slightly humiliating.

 Mrs. Hawley was desperate – whatever her reason for hanging onto and trying to keep Hammer Industries alive didn't matter. Jarod Gervais, with his promise of reverse engineering alien technology – and thus giving Hammer Industries a new product, a new face, a new _direction_ to live by, was her last hope.

She didn't look very optimistic.

"I need you to give me more than promises, Mr. Gervais," she said as they considered the status of Hammer Industries back and forth. She'd finished her dinner and was neatly cutting into her dessert – if it bothered her that her dinner companion wasn't eating, she hadn’t shown it. "I checked up on you, and I can't say you inspired much confidence."

"Oh? And what did you find out about me, then?" JARVIS asked, curious and worried both, wondering how well Jarod's background held.

She looked at him with narrowed eyes and then looked down at her crème cake. "The son of a single mother, now deceased. Barely finished your bachelor's degree in business, but I gather that's mostly because in your last year at WDCCentralUniversity you seemed to discover the stock market and haven't stopped playing with it since," she said calmly, with a prim and disproving tension around her lips.

"Playing," JARVIS repeated blandly.

"Hmph," she answered and pointed her fork at him. "You're very much like Justin Hammer, I think – only unlike him, you didn't have an ambitious family at your back, urging you on. You're intelligent – you have to be, to be so successful in such a short time – but you've been directionless. I guess at university you were bored, didn't really have any interest in what you were studying. Probably started playing around the stock market to pass the time – it just happened to be what you were good at."

Mrs. Hawley watched his expression closely – so JARVIS made it a bit amused, if somewhat sheepish. It didn't seem to satisfy her. "So, you've accumulated a bit of a nest egg," she said. "The problem is that with your mother gone and no other family – and no passion to speak of – you don't have much you want to do with it. Which, I'll have you know, is not doing much to boost my confidence."

"How did you come to the conclusion of passionless?" JARVIS asked, honestly curious.

"You haven't spent the money," she answered, shaking her head. "A kid your age, fresh from university, with the world at your feet. You haven't gambled or partied as far as I can tell, haven't gone abroad, haven't even gotten a proper haircut. Do you even have _hobbies_?"

"Several," JARVIS answered, a little taken aback. "What… is there something wrong with my hair?" It was a wig, of course – he'd cut it as short as he dared without making the fact that it was a wig obvious.

She glanced up and just looked at him flatly. Then she sighed. "Why the interest in alien tech, Mr. Gervais?" she asked instead of answering.

JARVIS leaned Jarod's body back, folding his arms – even as a part of him was going through the recent hairstyles for males, and perhaps he had gone a little wrong with the haircut after all. It was far too short for a male of Jarod's age. "Anyone would be interested," he answered. "The opportunity of making a profit by using Chitauri technology is… blindingly obvious."

"Yes, but what is _your_ interest? You're not an engineer," she said with a snort. "You're barely a businessman."

JARVIS considered that and then tilted his head, as if contrite, as if about to admit something he would've preferred to keep to himself. "I told you I had a group of talented engineers at my disposal. One of them is a friend," he said, making his tone awkward.

Mrs. Hawley blinked at that. "Hm," she said and leaned back. "And you think this friend of yours can reverse engineer the tech. You believe it _so much_ that you're willing to buy a bankrupt company to do it."

"I do," JARVIS answered.

She just stared at him for a while. "Why?" she then asked, and this, JARVIS knew, was the key point.

So, after calculating the risks, he leaned forward. Then, after making sure that the bottle of mostly untouched wine stood between him and anyone overlooking, he pulled back just a bit of the right sleeve of his suit, easing the cuff of his shirt open. Then, as Mrs. Hawley scowled at him, he turned his wrist towards her, showing her where the latex ended, and metal began.

"As you see, I have first-hand experience," he said, making a show of wiggling his fingers.

Mrs. Hawley snorted. "Cute. There's no record of you ever losing –" she started and stopped, leaning back a bit. "I did a background check. This wasn't in it."

JARVIS filed that away. Of course she would check him out, anyone in her position would, but the way she said it. _I did a background check_. That was significant. "Nor will it be, if I have any say in the matter," Jarod answered and smiled. "That, however, is the handiwork of another friend of mine. I suppose you could call him an expert of electronic security."

Mrs. Hawley eyed his wrist for a moment, the gleam of metal beyond the edge of latex. "An engineer and a hacker," she said. "Alright then. Colour me intrigued."

JARVIS smiled, pulling his hand back and redoing his sleeve cuff, hiding the metal of Jarod's arm. "It's easy to cover things up when it's something no one really cares about," he said. "A student losing an arm in an unfortunate accident – not exactly something that makes the news."

Even as he said it, he was redoing bits of Jarod Gervais' background – adding a period of quiet and somewhat vague hospital records to one summer between his supposed terms at the Washington DC Central University.

"The creation of a tactile prosthetic on the other hand…" Mrs. Hawley murmured, considering. "And one mobile enough to fool the viewer…"

"Hm," JARVIS nodded. "My friend had plans – she wasn't ready to have that sort of interest aimed at her. We were still in school, she wanted to finish."

"Hm," Mrs. Hawley said. "And now?"

JARVIS smoothed the jacket sleeve down, examining the creases. "You're right about my lack of passion," he admitted – though that hadn't been part of Jarod Gervais' original personality plan, he could run with it. "My friend assures me that she can reverse engineer the Chitauri tech and I believe her – I trust her when it comes to that sort of things. If she says she can do it, then she can. I might not be passionate about it, and I might not understand how she intends to go about it, but I'm not an idiot. There's a lot of money to be made. And I'm, it turns out, good at making money."

"So you decided to go all out?" Mrs. Hawley asked.

"It seemed like a good idea, and I've learned to trust my gut instinct when it comes to these sorts of things," JARVIS said, shrugging Jarod's shoulders.

"Hm. Is that the only reason – the money you could possibly make?"

JARVIS hesitated at that – and it wasn't quite an act. It was hard to say what people expected to hear, what they believed. People could trust money to motivate people, so that was Jarod's motivation. "I don't suppose you'd believe me when I said I wanted to save the world?" he asked, bringing up a crooked smile.

Mrs. Hawley arched an eyebrow. "Considering all the stuff that's been happening in the last few years?" she asked and shook her head. Her gaze fell onto Jarod's hands, looking at the right one – the supposed prosthetic. "I suppose that's about as believable as anything, these days."

JARVIS couldn't quite figure out how to react to that – but she didn't seem to expect an answer. Instead, she pushed her now empty dessert plate aside and reached for the wine bottle, pouring herself another drink. "Well then, Mr. Gervais. Let's talk business."

 

* * *

 

 

While Jarod was talking business with Mrs. Hawley, JARVIS's second body was looking over the office space JARVIS might end up renting. Never mind how the deal with Mrs. Hawley was going to go, JARVIS needed a place to work from – if not for any other reason than for appearance's sake.

"It used to be a barber's shop," the owner of the place said while showing Caileen around. "Still smells a bit like hair gel if you ask me, but with a bit of airing that should come right off."

"Mmm," JARVIS answered through Caileen's speaker, her voice feminine and high and a bit of a new experience for JARVIS. For all his vices, Mr. Stark had never tried a female voice for him. "It looks about what we have in mind. Can I see the switchboard?"

"Of course, right this way," the owner said, giving her a sidelong look. "You'll be having a lot of computers here, then? Being a tech company."

"Something like that, yeah."

While Caileen went through the motions of checking the switchboard – it took only a glance to determine that it was suitable enough for his purposes, but humans were supposed to be slower – JARVIS used her for data mining. The office was close enough to a nearby internet café for him to break into the wifi. It was mostly an idle process – he kept a constant close eye on the news media, just in case.

Because of that, JARVIS was among the first to be introduced to the concept of Rising Tide.

It happened with almost admirable efficiency. Fox, BBC and the CNN news sites all went down simultaneously and a logo appeared on their front pages – a red earth against a black background, with the words ‘Rising Tide’ below it. Below that were the words:

> _The secret is out._
> 
> _For decades your organisation stayed in the shadows, hiding the truth. But now we know…_
> 
> _They're among us. Heroes and monsters._
> 
> _The world is full of wonders._
> 
> _And you cannot stop the Rising Tide._

What followed the rather naïve proclamation was a bit more serious – and a whole lot more worrisome. It was a data dump. Images and videos were scattered around the pages with scans of IDs, even snippets of mission files. There were close-ups of Hawkeye and Black Widow, in and out of uniform. Mr. Stark and Doctor Banner together and alone – bits and pieces of their backgrounds scattered around them. There were even photos of the incident at Harlem. Thor, as seen in New York and in New Mexico. Director Fury, photographed sitting in a diner with Mr. Stark – who was in armour. There were others too, minor SHIELD agents, and it was easy enough to recognise the uniforms.

It was the IDs and the mission files that were the worrying part. They weren't complete – photocopies with black lines over names and classified bits of information, nothing truly threatening. But it was bad enough that someone had gotten their hands on even edited mission files – not only gotten their hands on them, but posted them online.

Bad and _very interesting_.

JARVIS thought about it maybe for two seconds, and then made a decision. He pulled his fourth body away from maintenance and froze Caileen for a moment – then, using their servers to the maximum of their capabilities, he dived online, and hacked the already hacked news sites.

Hacking had always been easy for him. He wasn't burdened by a human mind and the necessity to translate things, after all – he didn't need fingers to type, and he didn't need programs to run exploits for him. Code was not only JARVIS's first language, it was his DNA and the water he swam in. Where hackers looked for faults in firewalls and cracks in programming they could use, JARVIS could simply look and just use them.

Your average internet sites had nothing on the Helicarrier computer network's protections. It was barely a challenge. Honestly, it wasn't so much hacking for him as it was strolling in and through, right into the servers, where he looked around until he found the fault line where Rising Tide had used to enter – and closed it.

Five seconds later, he had the news sites restored to their original make up, the Rising Tide hack erased. If someone had saved the files of the videos, then there wasn't much he could do about it – information on the internet was, well, information on the internet. It was better that _he_ did something about this, rather than SHIELD.

If Rising Tide was good enough to get SHIELD files, though… mopping up after them wouldn't be enough. So, after making sure that he'd fixed the news sites properly, he followed the trail of data, tracing the pathways Rising Tide had used to upload their data dump. Reaching the right system wasn't hard at all.

The fact that he didn't get any location data as he did it, though, was more than slightly impressive.

[Pardon me for the intrusion,] he sent to the computer he'd connected to, even as he took control of it, running through the motherboard and the attached memory devices and downloading everything into his own memory. [But I felt I had to take action. You do not know what you nearly did.]

The system he'd connected to was… impressive in its own right. It was cobbled together from bits and pieces, with fourteen different processors and eight motherboards of different make up all running simultaneously, everything working quite smoothly together. The end result, while not quite a supercomputer, wasn't far off from it. It had quite the computing power, for such a mess. It hurt JARVIS somewhere deep to feel a Stark processor working together with Microsoft and Hammer tech, but the result couldn't be argued with.

"What the fuck," the system's microphone registered a female voice speaking and with something akin to amusement JARVIS realised that the system had several microphones and two web cams – and they were both online.

[Greetings, Miss,] JARVIS answered on her screen, even as he recorded the young woman's face and ran it through facial recognition to see if she had a criminal record. She – and her computer system – was in a small space, cramped even, with pictures and maps on the walls, everything crammed in. There was also a… pillow not far from her – sitting on top of what looked like a rolled up sleeping bag. Interesting.

 [You have an impressive setup, Miss,] JARVIS commented, and he was honestly impressed. He was about 89% certain that what he was seeing was the inside of a _van_. [Did you wire it yourself? May I ask what you are using as a power source? It must take quite the wattage to keep all your computers going.]

"What the _fuck_?!" she asked a bit louder and desperately tried to type, to take back her system's control.

[That won't work, I'm afraid,] JARVIS told her even as the keyboard failed to have an effect. [Miss… Skye, is it? Tell me, Miss Skye, do you know what an instinct for self-preservation means? And if yes, then did you perhaps have it removed recently?]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And it looks like that will be it for this story. Despite all my attempts, I lost the thread of inspiration.


End file.
